September 22, 2006

• Expiration Dates

  We got a new refrigerator in July shortly after Beth broke her leg.  Our daughter Catherine was here a lot that week, looking after her mother and helping me get used to having to do all the things Beth usually did (she’s back to doing almost everything now, even though she’s still in a wheelchair).  One of our chores was to clean out the old refrigerator, and Catherine and I did that together.

  
  

  As a restauranteur with lots of experience and lots of certifications in the safe handling of food, Catherine was utterly appalled at what was in our refrigerator.  She checked every expiration date, and she actually found something we had acquired when she was a senior in high school.  She’s now twenty-nine years old.  Needless to say, we threw away almost everything that was in the old refrigerator.  We obviously weren’t actually eating that stuff, but doing that made the thing look so empty, so deprived.

  
  

  Knowing my penchant for irony, earlier this week Catherine outted herself and told us that she had gotten “caught” by their soft drink delivery man with two bottles of Coke that were expired by two days.

  
  

  Huh?  Coca Cola has an expiration date?  What?  I didn’t believe it, and I dismissed that as something that only applied to restaurants.  Why that would apply to restaurants didn’t make sense to me, but maybe there was a good reason for it.

  
  

  Every day I drink several bottles of spring water.  I can’t tell the difference in taste between spring water and our highly-purified well water from the tap, so I refill those plastic bottles with water from the sink in the kitchen.  As I was doing that today, I noticed, quite by accident, an expiration date on the Aquafina bottle I was filling up.  The water that was originally in that bottle would have been good until November of 2008, but an expiration date for water?! 

  
  

  Who came up with that?  And why?  If the water’s contaminated in some way, won’t it show up immediately–like when you’re puking your guts out right after you drink it?  I checked the Cokes we have in our refrigerators (yes, plural; what middle class family doesn’t have at last two refrigerators?), and, yes, indeed, there is an expiration date printed on the can or bottle of Coke.  One can expired last May, and the bottled ones I bought last week expire on October 2, 2006. 

  
  

  This has got to be some kind of marketing ploy.  I mean, how can a bottle of water possibly go bad and pose a health risk?  And if it takes over two years for a bottle of “spring” water to go bad, what do they put in it to make it last two years? 

  
  

  Last night our other daughter, Susan, called to ask her mother about some shrimp she had defrosted.  She wanted to know if the shrimp might be bad if the shells had separated from the shrimp and their little “feet” had turned yellow.  Beth wasn’t here, but I told her I’d throw those things away.

  
  

  “That stinks,” she said.

  
  

  “Yeah, and that’s another good sign you can’t eat ‘em,” I said.

  
  

  She laughed hard. 

  
  

  Given the recent spinach “thing,” what is it safe to consume? 

  
  

  ED   

  • 10:19 pm
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